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Now that I had a fully functioning, and maybe the first of its kind, weather balloon tracking/photo-taking app, I was ready to send it off. I figured I better clear it with my boss to make sure it was all right to send my phone off into space. I am not sure if he quite believed what I was going to do but he was on board saying something along the lines of “You break it, you bought it.” With that green light, I ordered a 300-gram weather balloon off eBay and a 24” nylon parachute from Amazon.com. I used a piece of left over 1-1/2” Styrofoam insulation, some Plexiglas and zip-ties to build a box to house the phone. I sandwiched the phone in between two pieces of the insulation and cut out a hole for the camera to be able to take pictures.

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Having already built a number of Android applications, the process was familiar to me. But I did need to research using the GPS, camera, sending SMS messages, and creating a background service to run everything. The biggest obstacles were determining the best way to create and handle the loops that had to occur and getting the camera to work inside a service.

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As technology continues to expand, we are rewarded with affordable and sophisticated pieces of hardware that would have made any tech geek beyond excited just a few short years ago. This series of blog posts will chronicle my experience with some standard pieces of technology (by today’s standards) and how I used my imagination to push the limits of these devices to achieve a goal I dreamed about as a kid.

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With iOS 5 released and the iPhone 4s flying off the shelves, brands that have iOS applications are starting to ask if they need to continue to support older versions of their apps to reach the consumer base.  The answer, they will be happy to hear, is most likely no.

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Icelandic singer, Björk, is using technology to enable creativity for her newest album release.

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